Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao. Family in Six Tones. Viking, 2020.

Family in Six Tones is prefaced with a line from T. S. Eliot, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Lan Cao’s portion of this autobiography will disturb the universe of many Americans who lived through the sixties and seventies. Harlan’s portion may disturb contemporary readers. What a story they both have.

“Six tones” refers to the six vowel tones in the Vietnamese language. Many Asian and some Amerindian languages use tones of vowels in the pronunciation of their words. Mandarin Chinese has four tones. I have read that some Asian minority languages have as many as thirteen tones. Vietnamese has six. This is mostly Lan’s story, and that makes it her family’s story.

Lan Cao was thirteen when Saigon fell in 1975. Her family was able to leave Vietnam for the United States shortly before the end. In effect, she had known nothing but war her whole life. Her father was a high-ranking officer in the ARVN, the South Vietnamese army. One of her uncles was Viet Cong. She was surrounded by the action.

While the story focuses on Lan Cao’s upbringing and her transition to America from Vietnam, some of the most striking images are from her memories of the war. Some of the exploits of her father would impress any soldier. She lived right next to an army base and got to meet many American soldiers as well.

She shares a different side of the war. Americans tend to see it from a radically different perspective. Tim O’Brien, for example, has written some great stories and novels out of his experience in the war, but the characters are virtually all soldiers or veterans. The “peaceniks” who characterize today’s American elites have a different perspective. To Lan Cao these people at best know just a part of the story, at worst use their own point of view as a kind of self-righteousness that excludes other perspectives.

She notes the perspective of the history teachers where she went to college from 1979 to 1983:

Almost all of my teachers in the department saw Vietnam as their experience, their rite of passage, the triggers to their disillusionment, the portal to their identity and worldview. They wanted their Vietnam to be my inheritance…My teachers told me those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But what they wanted was for me to remember their past, to ventriloquize their memories, even though I was still trying to make sense of mine. (152)

Americans were concerned about Vietnamese suffering only if they believed it was caused by America. This way the Vietnamese remained perpetual victims and Americans perpetual holders of power—power to inflict and power to save. (155)

Although Lan Cao would become a successful lawyer before she started writing books, she notes a current of racism in her story. She was first in her high school class going into her junior year. One day she got a math assignment back and noticed a friend made the same mistake on one of the problems but was given more credit. She went to the teacher after class and politely asked if there had been a mistake.

“No mistake,” he replied. He knew exactly what he had done, and told her that he did not want any of “her kind” to be valedictorian. She did not graduate number one, but she did go to Mt. Holyoke, so she did all right, but the discrimination against her was overt and intentional in this instance.

She is honest to note that Vietnamese have their own prejudices. They look down on Cambodians and the minority people known as the Cham. Her mother’s family had nothing to do with her father for about twenty years because even though he was ethnically Vietnamese, he had lived in Laos.

Lan Cao gets reunited in America with Mai, a woman who had been a good friend when she was a girl in Vietnam. They become best friends in America, and she even moves in with the Lan and her husband after her own husband dies. Mai was originally from the North. When they revisit Vietnam in recent years, Mai speaks with a Northern accent when they go to Hanoi and other northern cities. It helps them get along better.

Considering that she came to the United States at the age of thirteen knowing virtually no English—she had studied French in school—this reader gives her a lot of credit that in five years she could get into one of the most competitive schools in the country.

Harlan Margaret Van Cao, her daughter, tells her story in alternating chapters. But most of her story until high school is about her family, particularly her mother. We begin to see that Lan Cao did have a kind of PTSD; she had developed multiple personalities to help her cope. Harlan then herself learns to cope with her mother’s occasional personality changes. That, too, is one of the family tones.

Harlan’s American father was considerably older than her mother. They had their only child together when her mother was 41. Harlan, then, experiences both the tender love her father had for her, but she also recalls him dying when she was thirteen. Her father’s family name was Van Alstyne. Her name Van Cao is a combination of the family names of both parents.

For many years the family lived in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her father was on a college faculty there. Her mother also eventually went into teaching law as well. Most of her mother’s relatives lived in Falls Church, Virginia, outside of Washington, D. C. They got together frequently, so Harlan also has a sense of the Vietnamese diaspora. Still, her mother is sometimes surprised at how independent she is even at a young age. Harlan will be American, not Vietnamese.

The family hears from the uncle who was Viet Cong. His life in Vietnam is hard. Even though he was on the winning side, he is not treated well by the government. Lan Cao tells stories of others like her uncle who were still suspected by the Communist government in spite of the side they supported.

She reads a book by another Vietnamese Communist who spent years after the war being “re-educated” in prison because “he asked too many questions.” She quotes what his testimony, The Vietnamese Gulag, says the prisoners were told by a high-ranking government official:

Ho Chi Minh may have been an evil man; Nixon may have been a great man. The Americans may have had the just cause; we may not have had the just cause. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced the people that Ho Chi Minh is the great man, that Nixon is a murderer and the Americans are the invaders…The key factor is how to control people and their opinions. Only Marxism and Leninism can do that. (157, ellipsis in original)

True radicals can appreciate that. For them is it not “speaking truth to power,” it is speaking power to truth.

In spite of the horrors of war, the psychological trauma, and family tragedy, there is a sense of triumph in the life of Lan Cao. She has overcome odds. She has successfully adapted to America without completely losing her Vietnamese identity.

There is a sense, though, that Harlan’s life could be tragic as well. She chafes at the label “sexually active” even though that is what she is. She is too young at fourteen. She has some unwelcome experiences. Boys get away with sexting her.

At the same time she and her best friend are accused of being lesbians—because her high school peers are faced with sexual pressures much of the time. She complains of depression. Perhaps it is from her father’s passing or her mother’s schizophrenia, but if her life becomes a tragedy it could be because she got caught up in the oversexed “Hollywood” culture in much of America today. That also brings depression.

Where I teach high school, I note even in the last few years, kids seem to be talking more openly about things that students in the past would never have discussed except maybe among friends, and never in mixed company. At the same time, they also appear to be more uncomfortable about such things.

This may be naîvely nostalgic, but I recall an episode from The Hiding Place, the autobiography of Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman who survived two years in German concentration camps for hiding Jews in her house.

She tells of the time when she was nine and asked her father a question about sex. He told her to remember when they went on the train to take a vacation and he had to carry her suitcase because it was too heavy for her. Right now, he told her, an answer to that question would be more than she could carry. When she is older, they will talk about it.

Family in Six Tones ultimately is about the loss of innocence in two generations. We can blame the war for the loss in mother Lan. She has done well in spite of it, and it has not been easy. For daughter Harlan, the blame is more diffuse, but her story reminds us that we should let children be children as best as we are able. They will have plenty of time to grow up and bear their own burdens when they are big enough.

Like Corrie ten Boom’s story, there is hope and a potential for making it through all right. If the American reader is disturbed by the story of either author, that may be a sign that there is hope and things are not always the way we think we see them.

P.S. I do not usually pay attention to quotations from reviewers on a book’s cover, but one got this reader’s attention. Author Robert Olen Butler is quoted on the back cover. Butler served in Vietnam as a U. S. Navy officer. He learned the language and got to know the people in a different way than many Americans who went there. His A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is one of the finest short story collections of the last century. Lan Cao describes regular customers at a relative’s Vietnamese market in Falls Church who are Vietnam vets who miss the country. They cannot return, but at least they can have some Vietnamese food and talk with Vietnamese people. Butler’s stories are like that. Like Lan Cao’s own story, some of his stories sensitively describe the challenges Vietnamese refugees face in their new home countries.